A Short History of Linux Distributions

Posted Jul 7, 2004 20:36 UTC (Wed) by roelofs (guest, #2599)
In reply to: A Short History of Linux Distributions by jlnance
Parent article: A Short History of Linux Distributions

I am not sure it was executable formats that pushed people from SLS to Slackware. I seem to remember that Slackware evolved because Patrick couldn't get SLS to incorporate the changes he had made to their distro. So he started his own.

That's my recollection, too. (Of course, we could just ask him...) In fact, I remember doing the a.out-to-ELF to transition (painfully), based in part on a file called move_to_elf and dated 19950520 (but not signed--can't remember if it was Pat's or someone like HJ's or tytso's). That was already in the Slackware 3.x days, I'm pretty sure.

FWIW, I still have a console-only Linux distro running on a 16 MHz Toshiba 2200SX (386SuX, remember?) with 4MB RAM and something like 24MB of a 40MB hard drive (with 4MB for swap and 12MB for an existing Win3.x partition, IIRC). It's still occasionally useful for taking notes, although the NiCads died long ago. I've also got a 75 MHz Pentium-based WinBook running Linux, X, and even Netscape 3.x in 16MB. Can't say I use either one very often, though.

Finally, I just found an old floppy labelled with a Post-It: "MCC BOOT DISK (Linux "nocdboot")". There's an unlabelled floppy next to it that might be the root disk...maybe I'll give it a try one of these days.

Greg